Alright my friends, welcome to Anti-War Radio, it's Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton, we're streaming live worldwide at ChaosRadioAustin.org and AntiWar.com.
We're going to go ahead and get to our first interview right off the bat today, because there's just too much to cover to try to fit it in 40 minutes.
We're going to at least spend this whole hour with William Norman Grigg, more commonly known as Will Grigg.
He's the author of the blog Pro Libertate, which you can read at freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
What a cool URL, right?
And he's the author of the book Liberty in Eclipse, the War on Terror and the Rise of the Homeland Security State.
Welcome back to the show, Will.
Scott, it's always a delight to be with you.
It's been way, way too long since we've talked.
I'm very glad to have you back on the show today.
Well, thank you.
Here's the thing, first of all, I think you do such a great job of discussing this.
It's really sad, but I think most people probably never even hear a real coherent argument about the founding principles of this country and what it means to really have liberty and the rule of law, unless they learn it from an elementary school level, total propaganda, George Washington is Jesus kind of model, or the cynical socialist, the founding fathers were all evil slave owners, so never mind any of that that we all learn in high school.
But nobody ever really sets it straight.
And you begin this book by saying, all right, look, here are the basic few premises of what you need to understand about America and what truly does make America exceptional.
As compared to, and you don't pull punches and go for, oh, what it was in Chile or something, the comparison is the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, and not the ultimate ends of all their acts and everything that they ever did, but the premises upon which their system was based.
So tell them, Will.
The premise of the American concept of government is the government has only one function, and that is to protect the individual rights, and that of course includes the individual property of the American citizen.
The government exists for no other purpose than it has only those powers that are delegated to it by those individuals seeking the protection of the law.
And the law exists in order to protect people from force and fraud, whether you're talking about force and fraud, which is used by private criminals, or more commonly now, the force and fraud exercised by the government that rules us.
If you go back and read Locke's, John Locke's Second Treatise on Government, he makes one of the most compelling points in this realm when he points out that if rights are abused, it makes no difference substantively if they're abused by private criminals or by state actors, that is to say people acting on behalf of a monarch, on behalf of a dictator, or on behalf of a president, the offense and the impact is the same.
And another really useful insight in this regard that I quote all the time is from St. Augustine's City of God, where he talks about the fact that if you remove justice from the equation, all a kingdom, all a government becomes is simply a vast band of robbers.
And so the American founders, who understood that they were flawed men, and that they were by no means immune to the seductions of power, did something remarkable, and I think unprecedented in history, and we're probably never likely to see something similar to this again.
They wrote a charter of government that was specifically intended to limit what they could do with power.
They distrusted power so thoroughly that they didn't trust themselves exercising power.
And the purpose of exercising delegated power or authority, I mean, authority basically is power limited by law that is revocable once it's abused.
The purpose of authority in our system is only to protect the individual right, the rights of the individuals.
And the concept that we have now, of course, is that government somehow is this merciful and omnicompetent agency through which benevolent people can improve our lives through the judicious exercise of power.
And we never really believed, if you define we to include those of us who still cling to the founding concept of American constitutionalism, that power could be used judiciously.
We believed that power had to be constrained by law, and that ultimately the enforcement agency in a republic, a constitutional republic like ours was intended to be, would be the people themselves by taking back the delegated authority that they had lent to government.
That's, once again, a unique concept in the annals of history.
There were elements of it that you could find in the way that, for instance, some of the Greek city-states were ruled, and you can see elements of it in the ancient Roman Republic.
I contend that you can see elements of it in the ancient Hebrew confederation before they ended up with a king.
But really, to see it in its full flower, you have to take a look at our basic founding documents, then you have to lament, a little bit like Jeremiah the prophet of the Old Testament, for the fact that we lost that system pretty quickly after it was introduced.
It's true.
Well, you know, the concept has at least, it seems like the politicians, most of this time, have at least pretended to uphold it.
And obviously there have been pretty big revolutions in our system before, especially during the Civil War and the World Wars and the New Deal and all that kind of thing.
And yet, it seems like, and as you really illustrate in this book, Beyond Comparison, I think, just especially in the last eight years, in the last two Bush Jr. administrations, we have seen the presidency basically wage war simply on the concept of the rule of law at all.
Yes, exactly.
What you've had during the reign of Bush the Lesser is really sort of the distillate of this concept of arbitrary force as embodied in the dear leader who is essentially above the law.
And that is a concept the Germans in the National Socialist era referred to as Führerprinzip or the leader principle.
In the Leninist system in the Soviet Union, which I think is another very useful analog here, they referred to it as democratic centralism.
The idea that the will of the people, the sovereign will of the people, had been invested in the ruling oligarchy of the Soviet system.
And more particularly in whoever was the primus intrapares, the first among supposed equals within that system.
And of course it would be Lenin followed by Stalin.
And all the things that Stalin did, all the horrible, grotesque things that he did with the powers that were accumulated by the ruling oligarchy of the Soviet Union were pretty clearly adumbrated in what Lenin set forth.
I mean it was Lenin who created the system and it was Stalin who perfected it.
But it's all based on the idea that there is an elite, call it an oligarchy, call it a nomenklatura, call it the establishment in this country, the bipartisan consensus if you will, the brokers or the custodians of the bipartisan consensus.
There is an elite that is fundamentally above the law.
And within that elite there is one individual, the figurehead who is regarded as the dear leader, who is essentially a sovereign within himself and beholden to no one in the exercise of his powers.
And that's always been of course a danger that our founding fathers had warned about.
If you go back and read the notes that Madison kept to the Constitutional Convention, you become I think aware of the fact and quite struck by the fact that while the founding fathers living in the late 18th century obviously didn't clearly foretell the arrival of people like Lenin and Hitler or for that matter people like Robespierre in the French Revolution just a decade and a half or so down the line.
But they did talk about Caesar and Cromwell and Catiline and these people from antiquity who had irrigated to themselves powers in the name of the people.
And they were aware of the fact that a demagogue could arise and consolidate power, generally acting in the name of some pressing emergency.
And in doing so said demagogue could destroy whatever instruments of diffusion of power the founding fathers were trying to preserve by writing a constitution.
And that's been a temptation for many presidents in our past.
Of course you take once again a look at the war between the states.
You saw that Lincoln in many ways did that.
The detestable Woodrow Wilson of course was the modern example of that same idea.
I can't remember who it was who once said that Woodrow Wilson was so fused with good intentions he could pave the road to hell all by himself.
After he finished paving the road to hell by getting us involved in the world war in Europe, which of course was none of our business to get involved with, Woodrow Wilson inserted himself into European politics.
And it was really interesting.
He was somebody who was looked upon as almost a savior figure, which of course played very well to the fundamental conceit that Woodrow Wilson had by way of his own self-image.
There are accounts you can read, I believe in Thomas Fleming's book Illusion of Victory for instance, you can read about how when Woodrow Wilson's train went through Italy, there would be peasants, Italian peasants, kneeling by the side of the road as his train would go by, which of course played very well with Wilson's sense of himself.
But he didn't really consummate this idea of a president that was completely above the law.
FDR in some ways did.
Everybody talks about what Nixon did in terms of the crime wave that we refer to as Watergate, as if this were somehow unique, but it was pretty much in the mainstream of presidential abuse of power up to that time.
But what really sets the Bush regime apart, and I use the term regime here fully aware of the connotations that that term possesses, what sets the Bush regime apart is the clear and explicit and repeated assertion by George W. Bush and the people around him that as a war president, he is essentially not beholden to the law and not beholden to anybody else under the heavens, that he is perfectly and completely sovereign in his will to order anything he sees suitable by way of a policy, whether or not it happens to be legal in the interest of preserving what these people are pleased to call the public good.
So he can order wars on his own volition, supposedly.
He can order the summary execution of people purportedly once again on his own authority.
He can order torture.
He can do pretty much anything that he sees fit to do as long as he invokes this notion that he is invested with a special status as a war president.
Now, we've had three major Supreme Court decisions and some lesser federal court decisions, but primarily in the Supreme Court we had Hamdan, Rasool, and now the Boumediene decision.
And now, do these say, no, Mr. President, you really are not the king and effectively bind his power back at least the way it was before George Bush?
Well, Boumediene in particular was intended to do that, try to accomplish it.
Hamdan, it seemed to me, the first of those three you mentioned was intended sort of to channel or to attenuate the claims of power by giving them sort of a superficial aspect of legality.
The Supreme Court seemed almost to be issuing in that case sort of an advisory opinion telling the Bush administration, the Bush regime, how better to carry out the policies they were seeking by getting Congress involved at least to some extent in the creation of these tribunals and in the institutionalization of these extraordinary practices.
Boumediene seemed to be a little bit better, quite a bit better as a matter of fact, in terms of trying to address a lot of the claims that had been made by the Bush administration.
But once again, the Bush administration has seen fit to seek out allies within the federal judiciary to try to find exceptions even to the Boumediene decision.
And when it comes to matters of the legislative power to restrict what the government can do, what the government can do, what the president can do specifically, Mr. Bush has time and time again issued these signing statements, which he is using in a rather unique fashion.
The signing statement historically has been a set of instructions to the executive branch over whom the president has oversight responsibility.
Explain to them how they are to carry out the terms of a specific legislative enactment.
What Mr. Bush has said is that by way of – actually this is something that Samuel Alito suggested back in 1987.
He's now sitting on the Supreme Court.
But when he was a relatively junior member of the Justice Department Prosecutor Corps, he was suggesting that signing statements could be used in the way that Mr. Bush is using them, which is to nullify certain elements of a bill he just signed into law.
I mean, this isn't a line item veto.
This is a president acting basically as sort of an ultimate legislator and ultimate judicial figure by saying what parts of the law he just signed or what parts of the bill he just signed into law he's going to ignore by way of policy.
Mr. Bush has used that completely spurious technique very promiscuously, particularly in the first term.
And so we sort of skip past.
We talked about – I brought up all these Supreme Court decisions, striking down or at least attempting to strike down or at least say, well, Congress, you have to pass a law to make what the president's been doing legal, which they of course have done.
But we sort of skipped over exactly what it was they were doing in the first place, particularly, as you say, in the first administration before any of these decisions started being handed down.
They basically claimed that the president could determine by himself that the whole world was a battlefield despite what Congress said and that he could abduct, torture, and murder or wage war even anywhere on this planet Earth with no restriction by the law whatsoever.
Exactly.
You talk about the idea that a president on his own supposed authority can commit our country and its resources and its military to make war against any target of his choosing.
That's something that obviously the founding fathers in crafting the war powers never intended to permit.
They were very leery of the possibility of creating a monarchy with respect to having one executive.
There was actually a period of time where they were considering dividing the executive between two chief executives, I guess on the assumption that it's better to have the two executives fight among themselves rather than have one person consolidate powers to the injury of everybody living within the republic.
But they obviously took very great care to ensure that the powers of the president as a wartime commander-in-chief would be inferior to those of the king against whom they dismounted this desperate rebellion.
But the other element of what's been going on under the Bush regime here with respect to war powers is this idea of designating by presidential decree anybody anywhere on earth, whether or not they're an American citizen, as a so-called unlawful enemy combatant and stripping from that individual the protection of the law, which really takes us back to the first term of what we were discussing here this morning, Scott, this idea that the purpose of the law is to protect the individual.
If you have in the person of the president the ability summarily to denude an individual of the protections of the law, including the most ancient of the Anglo-Saxon due process guarantees, habeas corpus, the right to be brought before a judge and either formally charged with a crime or released within a certain very limited period of time, if you take that away, what you're doing is fundamentally investing the president of the United States with the indisputable powers of a totalitarian dictator as applied to that individual.
And that was the most radical claim that was being urged way back in the first term of the Bush administration, the Bush regime, if you prefer to call it that, was that the power to do so was within the ambit of presidential authority under the terms of what's now called the war presidency.
And this was first done to an American citizen in 2002 in the case of Jose Padilla.
And this was not subjected really to judicial review until very late in the process because the Bush administration in I believe late 2005, when it became clear that this was headed for a Supreme Court challenge, this designation of this admittedly less than savory American citizen named Jose Padilla as an unlawful enemy combatant, they made a point of taking this supposedly dangerous person who was such a threat to our institutions and such a threat to the public at large that he couldn't be tried in the regular civilian court system.
They took him out of the military custody in which he languished for about three years and put him into the civilian justice system so that this key contention would not be subject to judicial scrutiny.
And they were doing this once again to avoid a Supreme Court challenge they didn't think that they would be able to meet in order to preserve this claim of authority.
And in spite of the fact that the Supreme Court's made it clear that the president does not have the authority under the Constitution to do what Mr. Bush has done, they still claim that the president has the right to do it because they believe once again that the president is accountable to nobody once you've designated the individual occupying the Oval Office as a quote-unquote war president.
And now even after the Hamdan decision came down which said, no, you're a felon, you're guilty of five million counts of abducting and torturing and murdering people, then the Congress passed the Military Commissions Act which not only legalized it but retroactively legalized everything the president had been doing, but then he added his own signing statement even to that, right?
He did.
And then came Beaumedine that said that, no, habeas corpus does apply even though it's not in the Military Commissions Act.
Yeah.
And where we stand right now is that the Supreme Court says you can't do that and the Bush administration shrugs and says, well, that's a very interesting opinion but we don't consider ourselves to be bound by it.
But the Military Commissions Act, which you mentioned there, Scott, is I think one of the biggest and most avoidable tragedies in the history of our country.
I refer to it when it was passed back in 2006 as the Death to the Republic Act because what it was doing, in addition to all the horrible things you mentioned about legalizing torture and institutionalizing the same, which is something that I simply can't believe we would even discuss as a legitimate public policy option.
I wouldn't have believed ten years ago that we would get to the point where we would be discussing what would be acceptable modes of torture and retroactively immunizing people against prosecution for violating the law against such detentions, abductions, and torture.
Much less sitting here talking about how it was two years ago.
I know.
Exactly.
Exactly.
It's amazing that it's even in the rear view that far back.
But the thing about the Military Commissions Act, of course, is this break with habeas corpus that is the rudimentary due process guarantee.
If the government can summarily imprison you and it doesn't have to justify doing so, you have no rights.
And that is the foundation, I believe, of this homeland security state that we're living under right now is this assumption, and it lurks behind all of these impositions, both petty and severe, that we have on our individual liberty that are part of this process now, is this concept, this often tacit but palpable claim on the part of the government that if it chooses to, if its agents choose to, they can lock you up for good and you have no recourse.
You're basically somebody who is completely deprived of any status under the law.
You have no identity that the government is responsible for protecting or that it has to respect.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm talking with William Norman Grigg.
His blog is Pro Libertate.
It's at freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
His new book is called, well, it's not so new anymore, Liberty in Eclipse, The War on Terror and the Rise of the Homeland Security State.
And, you know, you brought up Jose Padilla there.
And, man, I've got to give you extra credit points, as always.
Nothing slips by you.
I had missed this, never heard this before in my life, but you got it.
Nina Totenberg on NPR News reported that all that controversy about whether Jose Padilla was mentally fit to stand trial after his treatment by presumably the CIA in military custody and the MKUltra no-touch torture that they unleashed on him, that they wanted him to be found unfit to stand trial so they could just lock him away in a mental ward.
Yeah, what she reported was that there had been a decision.
She was quoting somebody who was part of the process, that there had been a decision made that they were going to destroy his personality.
And that, once again, transgresses the line between common authoritarian thuggish torture or common authoritarian abuse of power that is typical of banana republics and petty dictatorships and absolute monarchs and so forth.
There's a line that separates regimes of that sort from a totalitarian regime of the Leninist, Stalinist, Hitlerite, Orwellian variety.
And that line is defined by the claim on the part of a government to have possession of and authority over your mind, your will, your personality, what Christians like myself call your soul.
And when they claim the right, as a matter of public policy, to go into somebody's mind and personality and destroy it, they've basically transgressed the line into outright totalitarianism.
And the fact that Jose Padilla, who'd been a gangbanger and a not particularly upstanding person, is an American citizen makes this all the more horrifying.
Obviously, from where I sit, it was to the advantage of the regime that they chose somebody who really isn't that sympathetic a figure to be the first recipient of this treatment, well, the first recipient of which we have public record.
And once again, it simply beggars belief that this has been happening in this country, this has gone on, and it's been a matter of public discussion, and people in apparently calm and rational tones have described whether or not this is the proper thing to do rather than rejecting it out of hand.
And that really is what I would consider to be the largest moral crisis of our time is the fact that Americans who are well aware of what's going on, those parts of the population who are well aware of what's going on, apparently have lost whatever moral gag reflex would cause them to rebel against this type of thing.
And it just, once again, strikes me as incomprehensible that a country which has, among other things, enshrined in the Eighth Amendment to our Constitution a pretty clear and plenary prohibition against torture, now treats torture as if it's a perfectly legitimate option, even when it's used to break down the fundamental personality of somebody who had never been convicted of a crime, who is an American citizen, who, at least in theory, is protected by our constitutional guarantees.
Now, in your book, well, first of all, you just brought up your faith there, and in the book, in your discussion of torture, you also discuss the role of religion in America and the role that plays in, you know, I don't really know how to phrase it, but something about how the state stands in for Jesus and people can worship either one just the same and go along with whatever, I guess.
They can find bans against torture in the Bible and they can find support for it if they want.
Yeah, well, the biggest issue for me is the fact that, as a Christian, the figure I worship as God incarnate was tortured by a criminal regime.
And he accepted this because it was unjust.
That's one of the paradoxes of the Christian faith, the fact that we worship a God who made himself powerless and who endured something that was fundamentally unjust in order to make atonement for the injustices we commit against each other.
Now, as a Christian, I can't understand how somebody who believes in the biblical account of the life of Jesus of Nazareth could countenance torture when it's directed against anybody.
And that's one of the reasons why I included that in that chapter dealing with torture, the fact that you've got these people who apparently are exemplars of Bible Belt or Midwestern Christian rectitude who find nothing at all amiss with authorizing the government to carry out torture.
I talk about a town where some of the elements of this partially submerged CIA air operation that is involved in extraordinary rendition, which is to say the abduction of terrorist suspects and so-called unlawful enemy combatants to distant countries where they are tortured either by CIA trained secret police operatives or by CIA operatives themselves.
And you have these Deep South Bible Belt communities where it is well known what the local private airline is doing.
And you even have people worshiping in these congregations who have either hands-on experience in delivering these people to be tortured or in some instances they are in some sense parties to the torture itself.
And you have these debates raging in these congregations as to whether or not there's a biblical case to be made for using torture as an instrument of state policy.
And of course, as you mentioned Scott, you can find within the Bible accounts that would seem to support either side of this argument if you're willing to do away with the clear moral imperatives that are taught here.
There are instances in the Bible where something is simply reported without making it explicit to somebody who's looking for a loophole that what is being discussed is something that shouldn't be done.
This reminds me of a conversation I had about 10 years ago when the topic was the impeachment of Bill Clinton.
Mr. Clinton was in the habit of going to church and being photographed with what I called a stunt Bible.
It was several times larger than the common Bible, I believe, so that the camera would pick it up.
And I noticed that he would litter his public addresses with references to the Bible and whenever he found himself in trouble, he'd descend on a nearby pulpit to vaticinate about some moral subject or the other.
And I once remarked that Bill Clinton obviously has read the Bible very carefully because he's read it in search of loopholes with respect to adultery, among other issues.
And what we have here is a much more serious version of the same fundamental hypocrisy.
Bill Clinton was looking for ways of justifying illicit sexual congress short of actual intercourse as something other than adultery, whereas today we've got supposed Christians who are looking for ways to rationalize something which is clearly an abomination.
That is the torture of other human beings made in the image of God.
I consider the latter to be a far greater offense than anything Bill Clinton ever did.
And, you know, religion is on, too.
He actually started the extraordinary rendition program.
Let's make sure that that's acknowledged here.
That began in 1995 under Bill Clinton.
It didn't necessarily grow into what it is today.
I mean, it took the perverse genius of the people running the executive branch today to turn it into what it is now.
Yeah, true.
Well, and, you know, part of that, you know, because it certainly isn't all about religion, and ultimately I think the role of religion, you could basically switch out the preacher for the guy in the white lab coat from the Milgram experiments.
And you talk about in your book, I didn't even hear about this one either, that ABC News replicated the Milgram experiments for our time.
And so briefly explain to the people what that is, and some of the numbers here are just incredible.
I don't recall the numbers off the top of my head here, but the Milgram experiment, or the experiments in authority, were intended to answer the question which has plagued a lot of people who study what happened in Germany during the Nazi period, which is how can people who seem to be rational and moral and in possession of a certain element of ethical self-control allow themselves to be put into positions where they do horrible things simply because they're ordered to do so by people in the position of authority.
And the Milgram experiment, Stanley Milgram was a psychologist who set up a little tableau in which you, if you were the supposed participant, were brought into a room and you were introduced to a man in a white coat who was the embodiment of scientific rationality and social authority, and you were introduced to a man that was described as the test subject, and you were told that he would go into another room and he would be strapped up to an apparatus that would deliver an electric shock, and then there was a voltmeter that was placed in front of you, and it had various increments of electric shock that you would deliver to the supposed test subject as part of this experiment, and at a certain point it would become lethal.
There was a clearly delineated point in this experiment where you were said, okay, if you go above such and such voltage you're going to kill the test subject, and what, of course, you're not told if you're a participant in this experiment is that you are the actual test subject, that the person who is playing the subject is an actor and that he's never in danger, and as the voltage is increased, the screams start to become audible on the part of the supposed test subject, and subject after subject, the people who were actually hands-on turning the dial up on the actor in the scenario would, at a given point, look at the fellow in the white coat, the supposed lab technician, and say, is what I'm doing all right?
They would be assured that they were completely immune to civil liability.
What they needed to do was follow instructions, and I'm trying to remember exactly what the percentage was, but there was a percentage, a critical percentage of people who, at the instruction of the man in the white coat, would turn it up, turn up the dial beyond the lethal point, and, of course, there would be ominous silence from the other side of the room.
I mean, they couldn't actually see the guy who was on the supposed receiving end of the shocks.
He was separated by a door or by a wall.
They couldn't see him, so they didn't know whether or not he was dead, but they couldn't hear him at this point, and for all they knew, they'd actually electrocuted somebody to death, but this is something that proved that there is a critical percentage.
I believe it's over a quarter, over a third of the people who are willing to turn the dial up all the way in order to kill this individual simply because they're instructed to do so by somebody they're told is an authority and who has granted them immunity from prosecution or from moral responsibility for what goes on in the supposed clinical environment, and, as you point out, ABC News just a few years ago replicated that experiment and pretty much replicated the findings.
There is something about a claim of authority coupled with the promise of an exemption from responsibility for obedience that induces human beings to obey, and what the Founding Fathers understood, these were individuals, once again, who had broken with a tradition of centuries' duration by demystifying the person of the King of England and by putting him down on a common plane with the rest of humanity and saying that he has a certain function as a king, and once he transgresses the boundaries of his due function, his due authority, then he's no more than another person.
He has no claim upon us.
We can revoke our allegiance to the king, and we can set out on the basis of the law that governs everybody and create a new society.
They understood, in some fundamental way, the danger of this appeal to supposed authority as embodied in a person, whereas today, we're always being marinated in this idea that there's a certain civic righteousness that is manifest in allowing ourselves to be dictated to and obeying whoever is in a position of constitutive authority, irrespective of whether what they're asking of us is morally sound.
I'm trying to paraphrase now that line from Henry V by Shakespeare that if the king is wrong, then our obedience takes the guilt of it out of us.
That's something that is very dangerous.
That's, of course, the moral equivalent of the famous Nuremberg plea that we were only following orders.
Well, you know what, people?
It's not just the Germans who are susceptible to that.
Americans have no blessed immunity to that tendency as well, as our history shows on too many occasions, and as our recent history in particular illustrates vividly.
Well, and I'm not too sure about the numbers either, and I'm probably confusing the original test numbers with the recent test numbers and so forth, but somewhere in there I think it was 60-something percent, about 65% or 66% were willing to turn the knob up to danger, at least threat of imminent death, if not all the way to the 3X level.
The Germans were 85% of Germans were willing to go along with this, and I guess this was in West Germany in the Cold War days back then.
But now they've included women in the ABC study, and women about split the difference between regular average Americans and Germans, and they came in at 73%, far more likely, about 10% more likely, or I'm no statistician, but however you correctly say that, 73% apparently were willing to kill a man if a guy in a lab coat told them to, if they were women here.
Yeah, and one of the things that I find really interesting is the idea that by expanding the franchise, this is one of the things that suffragettes actually claimed when the franchise was being expanded to women back in the early 20th century, is that if we did so, if we included the demographic pool, or expanded the demographic pool, and included in the great demos of voters the female population, that we would be less likely to see our country commit to wars.
And unfortunately what we have found is that for whatever reason, and I profess no privileged insight into motivations, in the human motivations with respect to the two sexes here, what we found actually is that it's had no impact, and what the new Milgram experiment data suggests to me is that actually in some ways women might be more suggestible than men when it comes to obeying constituted authority.
Maybe it's because men tend to be a little bit more rebellious.
Maybe there's something to be said for, if you will, the Peter Pan principle, that you just don't like to be bossed around.
That might help mitigate what we're talking about, but in any way you look at it, the numbers are horrifying.
Right, yeah, that difference is negligible.
As far as the men being better, it's pretty hard to say that.
You could say the women are worse, but the men are always better than men.
The men are a little less awful.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Well, and then there was the Zimbardo experiment, which somehow I've got to memorize that word, because it goes hand in hand with the Milgram thing, and it's almost as famous where they took the college students and put them in what everybody knew was a pretend prison built, and I'm glad that you said this detail, too.
I wasn't clear on this exactly.
They built a phony prison at the college.
It wasn't like they went and inhabited an old prison or something.
They built a phony prison at the college, and within a day or so, the guards were the worst totalitarians imaginable.
Yeah, and it all had to do with the costumes they were put into.
And this has something to do with the idea that the clothes make the man.
There might be a little bit more truth to that threadbare adage than we would be comfortable admitting, and that is that if you dress somebody up in exactly the same outfit as a cohort of people who are set apart from the rest of a given group of people by a claimed authority over the rest, and that they're all given insignia of rank and duty and privilege, that people start to act the roles they've been assigned, that it doesn't really matter how trivial or how transparently artificial the distinctions are.
It's just something that inheres in human nature that when you organize people in a certain way and you set them and segregate them in a certain way based on a claim of principle, people will start acting in that way.
And if you take a look at the way that both the military and the police are acculturated today, there's this effort to set them at a strict reserve from the civilian population.
I'm speaking now specifically of the police.
The military, of course, have always been a cast apart, and that's one of the reasons why, once again, the Founding Fathers, who included no small number of military veterans.
When you take a look at the people who were involved in the Declaration and in writing the Constitution and then the ratification debates, there were a lot of combat veterans in these groups.
But they were a little bit worried about the way that a standing army could eventually become sort of a Prussianized cast apart, and it would have unfortunate consequences for the effort to institutionalize a culture of freedom in this country.
But if you take a look at the way the police culture is evolving, or the guided evolution, I think, is a better way of describing the police culture, there is this effort to set police apart as sort of a Prussian cast, as sort of a Praetorian elite within our society.
And it all has to do with adopting the manners and accoutrements and language of the military.
And that, I think, is sort of an outgrowth of the same tendency that was documented in that Zimbardo prison experiment, the idea that, in some way, the baubles and the buttons and the badges and so forth really bring out, leach out of the human personality something that's really unfortunate, particularly, of course, when it's combined with other individuals and this cast that is set apart and set above other people.
And, you know, we have a thousand anecdotes now, but anyone could have predicted what happens.
I mean, if you look at these experiments, for example, and you just reflect on, like we were saying, the students, these are just students pretending to be convicts.
They really hadn't done anything to anybody.
The Milgram experiment was a memory test, like at the beginning of Ghostbusters.
Like, what do you think's on the flashcards?
Kind of a silly little test.
So what about when the people who are on the other end of the experiment are cops and are pumped full of steroids and are basically mindless brutes, as most of them are, and I don't think we should be shy about saying that.
It's obviously true.
And then the people on the other end of the wall aren't on the other end of the wall.
They're at the other end of the billy club or the taser gun, and they're presumed enemies.
Bad guys, not even suspects anymore.
Persons of interest or some other vague term which means get them.
Exactly.
And when you couple all of that with what has become the dominant ethic of police work today, which is officer safety uber a la, you have a really toxic mix.
I don't know how many times I've come across accounts of traffic stops or avoidable incidents of police violence or, for that matter, episodes like the Virginia Tech shooting of a couple of years ago, I guess it was about a year and a half ago now, where you find written in between the lines of common news accounts pretty clear evidence that the police were always thinking first and foremost of officer safety rather than the safety of the public.
Now, the proud boast of the police is that they are there to protect and serve, but we know from multiple redundant court decisions that the police are not criminally or civilly liable if they fail to protect any particular individual who's under criminal assault against his person or his property.
That means that the purpose of the police force has to be something else.
Well, under the homeland security ethic now, we know for sure the purpose of the police force right now is to protect the state.
It's not to protect the individual.
It's to protect the state against the individual.
That means that the fundamental posture of police now is to make the public submit.
I have a file probably a foot thick, and I'm not exaggerating, of stories of people who are arrested for resisting arrest or arrested for failing to obey the orders of a police officer, not because the arrestees in any given case were committing or were plausibly accused of preparing to commit a crime against persons or property or against this vague concept called public order.
I don't happen to believe that you should arrest somebody for threatening public order.
I believe you should only arrest somebody if he's threatening the person or property of another individual.
But people are arrested for either failing to obey an officer as the primary supposed offense or for resisting arrest.
Now, arrested for resisting arrest, that's a bootstrap paradox.
I mean, you've got to have some underlying predicate offense in order to be arrested.
But all this, of course, bespeaks the idea that when somebody wearing a state-issued costume and who is carrying weapons both lethal and less lethal, meaning, of course, firearms and taser weapons, issues you an order, you are simply to obey, as if that individual is somehow placed above you in the social plane.
And it's gotten to the point now where if you read, for instance, Police Magazine or any of the other literature that's put out by police and retired law enforcement for the supposed edification of active-duty police officers, the military ethic is pretty clear.
You don't see people wearing standard-issue police uniforms of 15 or 20 years ago, where they did look different from the rest of the population, but they looked a little less menacing.
They would be wearing a quasi-military blouse, yes, and a badge, but they would look like people you would normally see, for instance, at your local diner, as opposed to somebody who'd just gotten out of some secret military base and who had been, as you say, pumped to the gills with steroids and filled up with aggression.
The typical police department now is becoming more and more overtly paramilitary.
One really good example of the mindset that I'm talking about, that you might be familiar with, Scott, was a T-shirt that was issued just this last week by the Denver Police Department that was commemorating the riot police crowd control during the recently concluded Democratic National Convention.
This was, like most events of this sort, now it was designated a special national security event by the Secret Service, and you had paramilitary riot police being backed up by a joint task force of the National Guard.
The National Guard was providing satellite imagery to the police so they could keep control of the protesters and the crowd, and the riot police were clad in black with batons and with pepper spray canisters and a number of other so-called less lethal weapons in addition to firearms.
They looked uncannily like the U.N. enforcers from that somewhat fanciful, but only marginally fanciful, 1987 miniseries, America, with a K, if you remember that.
I've been thinking about that movie more and more lately.
I know.
We're living that in many ways.
But there were incidents of completely gratuitous, utterly avoidable police violence during the protest at the Democratic National Convention, and strangely enough, these were celebrated in this novelty T-shirt that was put out just this week.
It has a picture of this glaring, grimacing caricature of a riot policeman with a club in his hand rising ominously above the Denver skyline, and the inscription says, We get up early to beat the crowds to a 2008 DNC.
Wow.
Of course, beat is capitalized and made larger than the rest of them so as to play the double entendre.
I mean, in other words, the purpose of the police was to go out and beat people.
Well, they're real brave when they're taking on some hippies, but when there's two, what, 16-year-olds with guns in a school, killing children en masse, they wait outside in cowardly terror and do nothing.
We saw them live on TV.
Exactly.
They're paralyzed with fear.
They're losing bladder control.
They're creeping along at a pace that could be measured perhaps with a sundial if they're dealing with somebody who can actually do them harm and who is doing harm to innocent people.
On the other hand, they're bold as Hector when they're dealing with some slight, perhaps unpleasant female motorist who gives them a little bit of lip, or some unarmed male motorist who doesn't like the way that they're talking to his wife.
It's just really interesting.
It's a classic case, I guess, of sort of the kiss-up-and-kick-down syndrome that we see in some areas of life.
In this instance, the police are increasingly reluctant, including the SWAT and tactical teams, which are really military units.
They're trained by the military.
They're supplied by the Pentagon.
For the purposes of supply, they're considered a Department of Defense agency.
As I mentioned in the book, there's this outfit called the Law Enforcement Support Organization, or LESO, that was inaugurated in 1995 under Janet Reno, the victor of the Battle of Mount Carmel, Texas, in order to provide military hardware to police to fight the war on crime and the war on drugs.
Of course, the war on drugs is a big part of the story.
But LESO provides the local police departments just about anything they want out of the Department of Defense catalog, and they're treated as Department of Defense agencies in terms of the billing and the appropriations that go behind this allocation of equipment.
This is one of the reasons why your SWAT teams, your tactical teams, all look as if they're military units.
They're equipped by the Pentagon.
They're trained by the Navy SEALs and by the Green Berets, by the Delta Force in some instances.
And yet when they actually have an opportunity to throw down with somebody who's throwing lead, they wait until the individual is finished in most occasions, and then they go in and they string up the crime scene tape and they draw the chalk outlines.
Whereas the same SWAT teams and tactical teams, when they're doing 3 in the morning or 5 in the morning drug raids against someone suspected of having a negligible amount of a controlled substance, they will kick in doors, they will shove gun muzzles in the faces of people in their beds.
That's, of course, when their pure martial ferocity comes out, not when they can actually be using these so-called skills in order to protect the public, which is their supposed purpose for existing.
Now, something that's at play there, too, when you talk about the doctrines of overwhelming force and police safety and all that, they recognize, they must recognize, that the more they go around acting like stormtroopers like this, the more we genuinely hate them, the more they fear us.
Yeah, exactly.
It becomes a reinforcement loop.
It's just like exactly what created the insurgency in Iraq, where people, I mean, you read Aaron Glantz's book, How America Lost Iraq, here were people who literally were willing to tolerate invaders occupying their country as long as it was over within like a year or so, and you really promise you mean well kind of thing.
And yet, here come people kicking in their doors, you know, we've been, as it's detailed in your book, you know, deliberately giving people hypothermia, beating them, sticking dogs on them, and otherwise humiliating them.
And the more our guys torture them and beat them and terrorize them, the more people resist, the more the American soldiers feel like, hey, I'm not here to help these people, I'm here to defend myself and my buddies from them, I'm at war against them, and the reoccurring cycle, they're bringing this home to our country, you know?
Give up your empire, live under it.
Yeah, they are very much bringing this home to our country, and this is the ineluctable logic of empire.
You can't have a republican home that sustains an empire abroad.
And the other thing that people have to understand is that the chief recruiting pool for law enforcement in this country consists of people with military experience.
And if you have military experience today, that means you're almost certainly going to have some kind of experience in maintaining an occupation, and that entails a mindset which is completely incompatible with being a peace officer in a free country.
And it's interesting to me that if you take a look at the abuses that have been wrought in Iraq, a lot of these actually grow out of domestic law enforcement doctrines.
For instance, the first place, and this is something I point out in my book as well, the first place I have found where the expression clear and hold was used with respect to the occupation of a civilian population was in Bakersfield, California, back in 1999 during an operation that was being waged against suspected drug dealers in an urban area.
Okay, now, just to be clear here, they got rid of Pace, who was sending out our guys just to hunt and destroy or whatever, and then they brought in the genius Petraeus, who said, no, instead we need to clear and hold.
This coincided with some other things, but somewhat reduced violence in Iraq.
This is what we're talking about, and this is what our soldiers do when they're occupying somebody's third world country.
Yeah, and what they had done in this operation in California was they had designated entire sections of a given city as enemy territory, and they went in house to house, and they threw people to the floor at gunpoint, and they would search the house, and they would tell these people they were looking for a given set of suspected drug smugglers, and that if they had anything to do with these drug smugglers, they would be treated as criminal suspects, the equivalent of being treated as enemy combatants in this context.
And this was being done by a group that called itself the Wolf Pack.
It was a militarized tactical team with, I believe, the Bakersfield Police Department, and this was being done with automatic weapons and with helicopter support and with armored vehicles.
It was very much the same kind of thing that Petraeus was doing, but it did involve the bribery that was really the key to the supposed success of the Petraeus surge.
But if you go and take a look at, I believe, the current issue of Police Magazine, there's an article there about the need for a surge in our inner cities.
And so it really becomes sort of a self-sustaining cycle here, where it's first tried out by militarized police here in the United States.
It's perfected abroad against populations that Americans don't care about, because after all, all these undifferentiated mass of Arabs, they have to be considered our enemy anyway.
And then the people trained in these tactics come back, and either they resume their duty as police officers, because a lot of the people doing this abroad are reservists and guardsmen who are civilian police, quote-unquote civilian police in normal life, or they end up being recruited by police departments to do the same thing here that they're being trained to do overseas in Iraq.
Well, I'm here to tell you, and I know only just from meeting people and talking with people, that you take the average poor black person in this country, even in a real nice town like Austin, and tell them that the police are an occupying army in their town, and they'll say, yeah, I know, so what's your point again?
Exactly.
It's like, oh, good, nothing gets by you.
We're not going too fast for you.
That's sort of the reaction.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Oh, what?
America's a police state?
Yeah, tell that to a black guy.
He'll be shocked to see.
It's like talking to an Indian about what a good idea a treaty is.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Yeah, that's a good idea.
That'll work.
Yeah.
All right, now, when I was a kid, me and my friend used to play guns in the woods and GI Joe and all that stuff, and I didn't talk to him for, oh, I don't know, 25 years or something like that, and somehow, friend of a friend of a friend, I got his phone number, I called him up, and he's a cop in Washington, D.C.
Oh, wow.
And I said, so what do you do nowadays, you know?
And he said he chases crack dealers around all night and, you know, thugs and pimps and gangsters and muggers and the scum of the earth.
And I said, man, come on, you've got to legalize crack.
Yeah.
Obviously, right?
You understand, don't you?
And he said, huh?
And you know what?
Go ahead and explain to the good people, Will, because I know that you don't condone illicit drug use and abuse.
No, of course not.
Or the drug trade in any sense.
I know that you define yourself as a conservative in the very best sense of that term, and yet I know that you know better, that you, even if you ever did support it, which I don't know if you were ever fool enough to support it, but you certainly learned the lesson that this, what, 40-year war, 70-year war against drug users in this country has gone to such lengths to destroy our liberty.
And I'll go ahead and cite one specific example that you talk about in your book, which is the multi-jurisdictional task forces, and right now we have city police and sheriffs and state police and homeland security and the FBI and the Secret Service and God knows who all working together, and speaking of undifferentiated masses of undefined police power, which we see, you know, when some innocent guy got shot when they raided the wrong house, these are the guys who did it most of the time.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And they're doing it because they have to produce statistics in order to keep receiving federal subsidies for the multi-jurisdictional task forces, and they often pay for themselves through asset forfeiture, simply by grabbing money or other property and forfeiting it, that is to say, stealing it for the benefit of the jurisdiction they're serving.
They've actually turned these so-called task forces into predatory robber bands.
But to my eternal shame, I did briefly support the war on drugs reluctantly about 20 years ago for about a week and a half, and I started to study the issue, and I said, this simply isn't going to work.
I said, I don't know if there's any case to be made for any government at any level fighting this aggressively.
You're fighting in the sense of trying to use whatever power or prestige it has to discourage drug use, which I think is a terrible thing, but if you just take a look at the logic of the proposition, the government doesn't have jurisdiction over your body.
It doesn't own your body.
It cannot properly tell you what you can or cannot consume unless it owns your body, which it does not.
So taken at the fundamental level of individual liberties, no, there's no moral case to be made for it.
But taken from the perspective of what it has done to the principle of liberty under law, it has been a full-throttle disaster.
It's done essentially what it was supposed to do.
It has committed an unlimited amount of resources to fighting an unwinnable war, and that's the best formula for enhancing the power of government.
The other thing that I tell people all the time, and I wish they would understand this, is that the only practical impact here of the so-called war on drugs is twofold.
It is to create this artificial subsidy to boost the profit margin of the criminals who currently control the drug market, and it is to enhance the power of the criminals who are fighting the drug market on the part of governments here.
I refer to this basically as the drug lord price support program.
That's all it does.
It boosts artificially.
It inflates the profit margin of really ruthless people, particularly in Mexico right now, who are involved in providing, supplying the market for narcotics in the United States while at the same time corrupting and empowering beyond any rational limit the worst elements of the government that rules us, and the worst elements of the governments that rule countries in Mexico and Latin America as well.
Well, how are you ever going to get this across to the people?
I mean, there's a certain segment of the people who have given up on this thing, but, you know, I read this thing in the Washington Post not long ago about salvia.
I don't know if you know what that is, but if you ever smoke it, it makes you feel like you took some laughing gas for about a minute or two, and then it goes away.
And according to this Washington Post article, the doctors, the research doctors, are so excited about this.
They think that, you know, God knows what kind of wonderful treatments for the mentally ill it could be used for and isolate its properties.
It's more or less brand new to them, and yet, here come the drug warriors.
And the quotes from the drug warriors in the article are just, you know, it's almost like when the American soldiers explain just outright in perfect English in such simple terms, well, the reason we call them hajis is so that it makes them less than humans, so it's easier to kill them.
Exactly.
Where you're just like, oh, my God, I can't believe, you know, how the honesty of the language.
These drug warrior guys just say, hey, look, people are getting high off of this.
We have to make it a Schedule 1 drug.
I mean, that's just it.
It's so de facto.
There are no consequences.
There's nothing else to consider except that some guy might be enjoying himself.
Meanwhile, it says all throughout the article, even in the Washington Post, you know, the Pravda of D.C., that nobody's ever died from this.
It's not a dangerous drug.
And it's not illegal.
Not yet.
Exactly.
But they're treating it as if it were illegal.
It's pretty typical of what we're talking about here.
They no longer consider themselves under the necessity of acquiring legal justification for imposing upon the rights of others now.
They just don't like it.
Ergo, because they have the power, they're going to use the power of the state to treat it as if it were a crime when there is no law against consuming this.
And it's interesting you talk about the fact that this is something that gives people a momentary pleasure that is regarded as illicit by people.
You know, that's Mencken, once again, Mencken's wisdom coming back to Honest when he defined puritanism as the pervasive fear that somewhere somebody might be enjoying himself.
And there is that element of totalitarian neo-puritanism at work here.
But also there is this all-encompassing desire on the part of the people who have government power to get more of it at our expense.
Right.
All right.
Now, by the way, everyone, it's Antiwar Radio.
I'm talking with William Norman Grigg.
His blog is Pro Libertate, freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
And, Will, is it okay if I keep you another quarter hour until my next interview?
Sure.
Because there's just so much more to cover here, and you're the best at covering it.
So tell us about the Panopticon and the surveillance state.
Let's talk about the Real ID and the RFIDs.
But first of all, the Panopticon in principle, what is this?
Well, Jeremy Bentham, who is considered the inventor of this school of philosophy called utilitarianism, once designed what he considered to be the ideal prison setting.
It would be a prison constructed in such a way that each occupant of every cell could be under surveillance at any time, and he would never know it.
And so it wouldn't be necessary to keep them under surveillance at all times.
But rather, give them the impression that at any given time, they could be under the surveillance of the prison ward, and this would encourage, or rather compel, the prisoners to behave themselves.
Because they'd never know when they would be under the scrutiny of somebody who could punish them even further or reward them for their compliance.
That's called the Panopticon, the all-seeing system.
And what's happening now is that our entire society is being turned into a Panopticon.
Orwell in 1984, and this is something I didn't put in the book, talked about the idea in different terms.
He talked about the way that those working for the Big Brother's regime who were in charge of scrutiny, surveillance, would hack into the telescreen.
And at any given time, a telescreen could be activated in reverse to keep people under scrutiny.
Of course, Winston Smith at one point gets in trouble because his telescreen is operating, and he's not aware of it.
But it's precisely because you don't know when you might be under the watchful eye of the state that you are being required to behave yourself as a way of self-preservation.
And that, too, is sort of the logic of every surveillance society.
East Germany had it down to an art form where he had pretty much the entire population acting as informants against everybody else.
You never knew when somebody would be listening for evidence of your betrayal, and that you would end up finding yourself on the wrong end of punitive state authority.
And in China, under the Chinese Cultural Revolution, they went so far as to have in some of the dormitories audio recording equipment that would gather the sounds of people sleeping, in case during their restful respite from totalitarianism, they happen to talk in their sleep and express counter-revolutionary thoughts.
We're not quite that far along, but in principle, we're not that far away from it either.
When we have, for instance, as I describe in the book, the requirement through the Real ID Act, and now the enhanced passports that we're required to have as a condition of getting back into the country once we have left it.
We have this traceable, trackable technology that is going to gather, first of all, biometric information into one huge database that would be used to track our every movement.
And then the RFID chips would be used to track our physical movement.
The biometrics would be included as part of the Real ID program, which is obviously a high priority for the people, the architects of the state.
So ardently have they pushed this, and so forcefully have they pushed against a few states that have decided they don't want to be part of the Real ID program, Montana being conspicuous among them.
But the passports as well are a very important part of this, and it's just interesting how it's getting to the point where we no longer can plan to make some trips that we used to think were relatively inconsequential in terms of the difficulty involved.
I was talking with my wife and children recently about the prospect of someday going to Alaska.
Then I caught myself and I said, we can't go to Alaska anymore if we really want to.
We can't simply go there on our own volition because we would have to have a passport to get back into the country.
We'd have to cross two borders to get into Alaska, two Canadian borders, two international borders to get to Alaska from here in Idaho.
And if we wanted to enter Alaska once we got into Canada, we wouldn't be allowed in without our passport.
And if we wanted to go back to Idaho once we'd taken the trip, we'd have to show our passport to get back in.
It'd have to be the new ARFID radio frequency ID-enabled passports that would be used to track our movements.
And the thing that I find really asinine about the ARFID technology, first of all, is the fact that it actually exposes Americans to greater risks from terrorists and from organized thieves.
As I point out in the book, there were experiments that were run by people who were experts in the dark arts of computer hacking and hacking small computer technology like the ARFID chips, the smart chips that contain all this data.
In which they have, with very little expense and very little effort, been able to create these small portable readers that can issue an instruction to an ARFID-enhanced ID card and then download all the personal information from the passport.
So they can use that to clone passports, to clone the chips and clone the passport technology and use them, for instance, as phony ID for crooks or for terrorists or people who want to commit fraud of various kinds.
You can use this as a way of identifying the given Americans in the crowd, and that can be very useful information to people who are in the horrible business of abduction, which is a really growing business right now in Mexico.
I wouldn't dare go to Mexico with an American passport right now, because it would be very easy to identify me as an American, and a crime ring who wanted to shake down my relatives for what little money they have would be able to identify me, abduct me, know who I am, by assembling one of these very cheap readers and downloading that information.
Yeah, but you're just ignoring all the good intentions behind this, which is keeping the Mexicans out, which is really important.
Exactly.
Let's remember which thoroughfare it is that is paved with good intentions.
Yeah, I know.
That's the idea that was driving this is crude xenophobia as much as anything else.
And the idea that there's somehow a good tradeoff involved if we become a supposedly sovereign and secure police state within firmly enforced borders.
There are a lot of people on the right, including some of my former colleagues at the New America, who think that this is a good tradeoff.
I strenuously beg to disagree.
Yeah, well, it couldn't possibly be if they ever read anything they ever wrote or you ever wrote before 9-11.
All right, now, I guess this is sort of the ultimate end.
Oh, no, wait.
No, I still want to talk about the PENOPTICON thing, all the data mining and all that stuff.
Oh, yeah.
I saw an email the other day that was going around that said, hey, listen, one of the major investors in Facebook is tied to this board of directors of this company that was tied to the CIA and whatever, whatever.
And here you're just giving the data mining program everything it needs about you, updating it all day and turning your life over to the CIA.
And basically, I don't know how much of that the government is really vacuuming up and sifting through, possibly all of it.
But I decided that whatever, screw it.
I put in some insane search terms into my Google machine and who knows what.
And you know what?
If all that goes on my permanent record, which I guess I safely have to assume it will or does go on there, yeah, screw it.
That's my job.
I mean, that's why I'm fighting them in the first place is because they're the kind of people who would do such a thing.
And so that's a decision I made as a professional paranoid back when I first plugged the dang thing into the wall.
Right.
But what about everybody else?
Well, you have people who are asking themselves, I think, who are not quite as paranoid as me, but still are saying themselves, geez, do I really want to go and have it in my permanent file that I look at?
Oh, I don't know.
Justin Raimondo's article three times a week.
Does that flag me as someone that they don't like?
What if I go and read Will Griggs blog about the police state all day?
Does that make me the next target?
So they back off.
It's that chilling effect.
Yeah.
And one of the things we have to do, and this is something I've said for 10 or 15 years, actually, is we we have to assume, first of all, the worst intentions on the part of those who rule us.
And secondly, we have to ignore those ill intentions if we want to live as free men and women.
That is to say, within the context of all these efforts to deprive us of that which make us human, which define us as individual human beings, we simply have to behave as if these things don't exist until such time as it becomes a matter of deciding how far we want to push that claim when prudence dictates that we take a little less confrontational stance.
I don't think that there's any way we can avoid the net.
The net is too all-encompassing.
The net is too finely woven.
It is in the hands of people who are completely ruthless.
It gathers of every kind.
We just simply have to assume as much.
We do know that there is a master list that exists.
We don't know how you get on it.
I would consider my life to be poorly lived if my name were not on that list because I want to make myself a conspicuous opponent of what these people are doing.
The time may come, God forbid, that in the United States we find ourselves in a situation akin to that of the Soviet Union.
I quote Alexander Solzhenitsyn's lament quite often about how we burned in the camps later thinking, why didn't we act when we had the chance to act?
Why didn't we do anything we could with any weapons at our disposal to oppose these people when they started plucking people off the streets and putting them into the gulag?
We're not quite to that point yet.
We can certainly see the foreshadowing on the horizon.
It's a cloud that is larger than a man's hand right now, to use the biblical expression.
But that doesn't mean that we have to act as if these people have completely won.
I mean, after all, at a certain point, the only way we lose for sure is if we stop fighting.
One of the best ways we can fight is simply to take control of our lives and live as free people in whatever means that we can.
If that means that you want to use Facebook, if you want to make use of the information technology to make yourself a better educated person and to network with others, by all means, please do it.
Don't leave the battlefield in the sole possession of the enemy.
That's the only way we lose for sure.
Right.
Oh, and by the way, I just wanted to mention as a parenthesis, and obviously you cover this at length in the book, again, it's called Liberty in Eclipse.
The Fourth Amendment makes all this data mining against the law and everybody in our government who is doing it.
If they're not outright a felon, I wish there were better teeth in the Bill of Rights, but still, they're at least breaking, obviously, and completely breaking the highest law in the land to do these things.
It's important to point out that just this year, of course, retroactively they granted immunity to the corporate interest, the telecom companies that are part of creating this cyber panopticon.
This was a measure, as many of these other measures have to do with enhancing the president's power over both the foreign affairs as a war president and domestic affairs as sort of a dear leader.
Most of these measures were supported by Barack Obama.
He was somebody who in the Senate voted on behalf of telecom immunity.
He voted on behalf of the FISA Bill, which is a very important part of this.
It doesn't really matter whether you end up with a Manchurian candidate or the anointed one as the president next January.
Either one of these people is an embittered enemy of individual liberty under law, and that's very much part of this dreadful bipartisan consensus we've been fighting for decades in this country.
All right, now I have two final questions, but not time for both of them unless you can figure out a brilliant way to weave the two together.
You may very well be able to.
The first one is posse comitatus, the law enacted after the Civil War, after the end of Reconstruction at least, which bans the use of the military against civilians in this country for police matters and what it's been up against lately.
And then also the real looming issue, especially in a Barack Obama or a John McCain presidency, is the dreaded national service.
What's happening with respect to posse comitatus is that on this very day, October 1st, 2008, we have a specially devoted brigade combat team from Iraq that is now the Federal Response Force, which would be called into power by the president in the event of a national emergency having to do with a man-made or natural disaster.
And this represents a huge breach in posse comitatus.
And one of the ways that you can weave these two together, quite frankly, the issue of national service and posse comitatus, is the fact that both Obama and McCain have talked about the idea of having a comprehensive national service program that would include a, quote, homeland security component that might mean that you would be recruited, or conscripted, better put, into the ranks of a paramilitary organization that would be part of the Northern Command, that would include this first brigade combat team or other military assets, such as these National Guard Joint Task Forces that have poolulated across the country, and that we saw at work in both Denver and St. Paul during the conventions.
And so what's going to happen, I believe, is that they want to create this seamlessly integrated system where when you turn 18, if you're going to be permitted to go to college, you're going to have to be serving two years, or as many years as they would require, of national service.
That means that some would be channeled to the military, some would be channeled to domestic homeland security service, some might be channeled into an education corps or an earth corps or whatever other body has been designated by the legislation.
But you would basically do away with the idea that there is any distinction between civilian life and military life at all whatsoever.
And the Posse Comitatus statute was intended to make a clear, bright-line, red-letter distinction here between the military's role, which would be external protection, or protection against external aggression, and the role of civilian law enforcement agencies, which would be to protect the rights, persons, and property of individuals domestically.
And what they're doing is they're basically taking away all the distinctions and turning us into one pretty much homogenous homeland security fascist state, which is the only way you can describe what we're seeing unfolding in front of our eyes right now, as much as it pains me to say so.
Well, and you know, the economics has a lot to do with it as well.
As companies fail due to the artificial boom and bust and all that, they go out of business, they're consolidated by the giants who are too big to fail and are protected, and then we even have the national government.
I don't know if they're the single biggest holder on Wall Street yet.
Almost, but they're not.
Yeah, getting there right now.
All right, well, geez, I've got ten other things I wanted to cover.
Actually, let me go ahead and ask you a last thing.
By the way, Robert Pape is coming up on the show, everybody.
Oh, wonderful.
Hang tight for that.
But where the hell are the American people on this, Will?
I'm sorry for the blasphemy of your manifesto.
Where the heck are the American people on this?
I'm fed up enough for everybody, but it doesn't seem to have the effect.
We've got to get everybody between you and Idaho and me and Austin, Texas, here thinking the same way and wanting to do something about it somehow.
Well, we did see earlier this week that there are episodes of conspicuous corruption and double dealing that are big enough that they will enrage the public into action.
When you saw the billionaire bailout package go down in defeat in the House of Representatives, it was because finally the threshold of outrage had been reached because it became clear that the powers that be were going to reach directly into our bank accounts, directly into our retirement savings, directly into our paychecks, and tax us for the benefit of corrupt, wealthy, politically connected people on Wall Street.
The problem here is that people don't understand how the system that created that outrage is tied organically to this system of imperial foreign policy and domestic consolidation of a police state.
It's not until people start feeling that the manacles chafe around their own wrists that they start becoming concerned about the intrusions on the Bill of Rights.
That's the unfortunate reality.
It used to be, as James Madison said, Americans took alarm at the first experiment on their liberties.
They resisted in principle these claims of power before, those claims that had hardened themselves in exercise.
What's happened now is that until people literally are at the point where the armored personnel carrier of the tank is screwing up with their cable television reception and knocking over the beer in their refrigerator, they'll start acting as intelligent Americans.
I don't know how we relieve people of that apathy and that torpor, but it has to be done very quickly.
Freedom in our time.
Blogspot.com.
That's the blog.
Pro Libertate.
William Norman Grigg.
The book is Liberty in Eclipse.
The War on Terror and the Rise of the Homeland Security State.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, Scott.
Thanks so much, Scott.
Take care.
